Working for a small daily newspaper is never dull.

It's always interesting to see how readers react to what we print.

Sometimes, it's absolutely amazing.

Consider this.

Parents of kids involved in sports seem to complain about coverage more than parents of kids who get arrested for committing crimes.

I'm serious.

Once in a while we get a call because a parent wants to keep Junior's name out of the paper or because we printed a story when Junior got arrested.

But much, much more often we get calls from parents of student athletes who want their kids' names in the paper more often.

And we get calls about the placement of local sports stories.

One reader even went so far as to inform us that "you only put our game on the front page of the sports section when we lose."

That's just absurd.

So I'm going to try to explain how and why we cover what we cover when it comes to sports.

This generally never works because no matter what you say, somebody gets mad or disagrees, but I'm stubborn. So here goes.

We cover seven school corporations - North Manchester, NorthWood, Tippecanoe Valley, Triton, Warsaw, Wawasee and Whitko.

There are eight fall sports per school. (Except Triton, Whitko, Manchester and Valley. They don't have soccer. And Triton doesn't have girls golf, either.)

If you do the math, that makes 51 sports to cover. If the average number of games per sport is 13, that's 663 sporting events to cover.

That's just varsity. Just in the fall.

We try to cover these because we are a county newspaper. We cover Kosciusko County.

This, of course, sets us up for criticism from both sides of the same argument.

We get criticized because we lean too much toward Warsaw.

But Warsaw readers say we devote too much space to other county schools.

Another thing to consider is how much sports have changed over the past few years. There are lots more of them. And if you go back a few years more you will note there were no girls sports to cover.

We responded by adding staff. This newspaper used to have but one sports person and some stringers.

Now there are three full-timers and some stringers.

Prior to each sports season, the sports editor makes up a schedule of what will be covered by each staffer, stringer, photographer and photo stringer.

If your team's game has a photographer scheduled, it will be featured on the front of the sports section.

Whether the team wins or loses is irrelevant to the placement of the story.

We got a call from a Wawasee fan complaining that when Wawasee won last week, the story was on page 2, but when they lost to Whitko the first week, the story was on the front page.

It has nothing to do with W's and L's. It has to do with scheduling.

Wawasee, for example, has nine regular season football games. We will have staffers at six of them and a photographer at five of them. On the nights when we aren't there in person, we take a call from the coach and get a story in the newspaper. The team will never be ignored,.

That is about average for coverage of county schools, with Warsaw doing a little better than average.

As far as photo coverage goes, the schedule looks like this: Manchester, 3; Triton, 4; Whitko, 4; NorthWood, 4; Valley, 4; Wawasee, 5; and Warsaw, 6.

And that's just football.

Coverage of minor sports (in the fall that's soccer, cross country, golf, volleyball and tennis) is a no-win situation.

You can never put in enough soccer stuff to satisfy a soccer mom.

The sports guys have scheduled four Warsaw regular season soccer games to be staffed. That's only a couple less than some schools' football coverage. But this somehow has been perceived as a "total lack of coverage" by some Warsaw soccer fans.

The sports staff tries to allot space based on reader demand.

They know that all kids in all sports work very hard and deserve recognition.

But they also know that, for whatever reason, more people are interested in reading about football, basketball and baseball than soccer, wrestling and track.

It's a continual balancing act. I know the sports guys will never make everyone happy. But they try. I watch them try every day. They spend lots of hours trying. It's not an easy job. They could literally watch a sporting event every night. Sounds like fun, eh, watching and reporting on some 200 sporting events per year.

I also know our sports coverage isn't perfect. There's always room for improvement. But be assured that the sports guys are trying to be fair.

So if you think your team or sport is getting the short shrift, think again.

The sports guys are just trying to achieve that ever-elusive small town daily newspaper sports balance.

Allow me to leave you with a couple things to ponder.

I've never had a complaint call from a student athlete.

Nobody ever complains if we miss the school board. [[In-content Ad]]